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      House G.O.P., Divided Over Immigration, Advances Border Crackdown Plan

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      Republicans are eyeing a vote next month on legislation that would reinstate Trump-era policies, after feuding that led leaders to drop some of the plan’s most extreme provisions.WASHINGTON — House Republicans on Thursday pushed ahead with a sweeping immigration crackdown that would codify several stringent border policies imposed by the Trump administration, after months of internal feuding that led G.O.P. leaders to drop some of the plan’s most extreme provisions.The House Judiciary and Homeland Security Committees in recent days approved their pieces of the plan, which has little chance of being considered in the Democratic-led Senate but sets up a pivotal test of whether Republican leaders can deliver on their campaign promise to clamp down on record migrant inflows.For Republicans, who have repeatedly attacked President Biden on his immigration policies and embarked on an effort to impeach his homeland security secretary, the measure is a chance to lay out an alternative vision on an issue that galvanizes its right-wing base.The legislation, now expected on the floor next month, would direct the Biden administration to resume constructing the border wall that was former President Donald J. Trump’s signature project. It would also mandate that employers check workers’ legal status through an electronic system known as E-Verify and reinstate the “Remain in Mexico” policy, forcing asylum applicants to wait in detention facilities or outside the United States before their claims are heard.The plan “will force the administration to enforce the law, secure the border, and reduce illegal immigration once again,” Representative Mark E. Green, Republican of Tennessee and the Homeland Security Committee’s chairman, said during the panel’s debate on Wednesday.Democrats have derided the package as misguided and draconian, accusing Republicans of seeking to invigorate their core supporters in advance of the 2024 election by reviving some of Mr. Trump’s most severe border policies. They made vocal objections to provisions that would ban the use of the phone-based app known as “C.B.P. One” to streamline processing migrants at ports of entry, expedite the deportation of unaccompanied minors, and criminalize visa overstays of more than 10 days.Republicans “want to appeal to their extreme MAGA friends more than they want progress,” Representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the top Democrat on the Homeland Security Committee, said Wednesday, calling the Republican legislation a “profoundly immoral” piece of legislation that would “sow chaos at the border.”Still, the package represents a compromise of sorts between hard-right Republicans and more mainstream G.O.P. lawmakers, including a mostly Latino group from border states that balked at proposals that threatened to gut the nation’s asylum system.The party’s immigration plan — which top Republicans had hoped to pass as one of their first bills of their new House majority — has been stalled for months. A faction led by Representative Tony Gonzales, Republican of Texas, has raised concerns about the asylum changes, threatening to withhold votes that Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California, cannot afford to lose given his slim majority.Over the last week, G.O.P. leaders have quietly made a series of concessions to win over the skeptics. Republicans on the Judiciary Committee agreed to drop a provision that would have effectively stopped the intake of asylum seekers if the government failed to detain or deport all migrants seeking to enter the country without permission. But the measure still contains a number of new asylum restrictions.“It’s in a good spot,” Mr. Gonzales said of the legislation on Thursday, saying that the changes made to the asylum provision had satisfied his concerns. “As long as nobody does any funny business — you’ve got to watch it till the very end.”G.O.P. leaders predicted on Thursday that they would be able to draw a majority for the legislation when it comes to the House in mid-May, a timeline selected to coincide with the expected expiration of a Covid-era policy allowing officials to swiftly expel migrants at the border. The termination of the program, known as Title 42, is expected to inspire a new surge of attempted border crossings and supercharge the already bitter partisan debate over immigration policy.But it was unclear whether Republicans who had objected to the E-Verify requirement would be on board.Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky withheld his support for the Judiciary Committee’s bill because of the work authorization mandate, arguing that people “shouldn’t have to go through an E-Verify database to exercise your basic human right to trade labor for sustenance.”Such databases “always get turned against us, and they’re never used for the purpose they were intended for,” added Mr. Massie, a conservative libertarian.Representative Dan Newhouse, a Republican farmer in Washington State, has expressed concern that the E-Verify mandate could create labor shocks in the agricultural sector, which relies heavily on undocumented immigrant labor. Though the legislation delays the requirement for farmers for three years, Mr. Newhouse has argued that any such change should be paired with legislation creating more legal pathways for people to work in the United States.With the expected floor vote just weeks away, G.O.P. leaders have been treading carefully, even making last-minute concessions to Democrats in hopes of bolstering support for the legislation.During the wee hours on Thursday morning, as the Homeland Security Committee debated its bill, Republicans pared back language barring nongovernmental organizations that assist undocumented migrants from receiving funding from the Department of Homeland Security. They did so after Democrats pointed out the broadly phrased prohibition could deprive legal migrants and U.S. citizens of critical services as well.Their changes did not go far enough to satisfy Democrats, who unanimously opposed the package on the Judiciary and the Homeland Security panels — and are expected to oppose the combined border security package en masse on the House floor.They have also argued that any measure to enhance border security or enforcement must be paired with expanded legal pathways for immigrants to enter the United States. More

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      US House passes debt ceiling bill in tactical victory for Kevin McCarthy

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      House Republicans narrowly passed sweeping legislation on Wednesday that would raise the government’s legal debt ceiling by $1.5tn in exchange for steep spending restrictions, a tactical victory for the House speaker Kevin McCarthy as he challenges Joe Biden to negotiate and prevent a catastrophic federal default this summer.Biden has threatened to veto the Republican package, which has almost no chance of passing the Senate in the meantime, where Democrats hold a slim majority.The president has so far refused to negotiate over the debt ceiling which the White House insists must be lifted with no strings to ensure America pays its bills.But McCarthy’s ability to swiftly unite his slim majority in the House and bring the measure to passage over opposition from Democrats and even holdouts in his own party gives currency to the Republican speaker’s strategy to use the vote as an opening bid forcing Biden into talks. The two men could hardly be further apart on how to resolve the issue.The bill passed by a razor-thin 217-215 margin.“We’ve done our job,” McCarthy said after the vote.“The president can no longer ignore” the issue of federal spending limits, he said. “Now he should sit down and negotiate.”As the House debated the measure, Biden indicated he was willing to open the door to talks with McCarthy, but not on preventing a first-ever US default that would shake America’s economy and beyond.“Happy to meet with McCarthy, but not on whether or not the debt limit gets extended,” Biden said. “That’s not negotiable.”Passage of the sprawling 320-page package in the House is only the start of what is expected to become a weeks-long political slog as the president and Congress try to work out a compromise that would allow the nation’s debt, now at $31tn, to be lifted to allow further borrowing and stave off a fiscal crisis.The nation has never defaulted on its debt, and the House Republican majority hopes to maneuver Biden into a corner with its plan to roll back federal spending to fiscal 2022 levels and cap future spending increases at 1% over the next decade, among other changes.In exchange for raising the debt limit by $1.5 trillion into 2024, the bill would roll back overall federal spending and:
      Claw back unspent Covid-19 funds.
      Impose tougher work requirements for recipients of food stamps and other government aid.
      Halt Biden’s plans to forgive up to $20,000 in student loans.
      End many of the landmark renewable energy tax breaks Biden signed into law last year. It would tack on a sweeping Republican bill to boost oil, gas and coal production.
      Democrats derided the Republican plan as a “ransom note”, a “shakedown” and “an unserious bill” that was courting financial danger.It’s a first big test for the president and the Republican speaker, coming at a time of increased political anxiety about the ability of Washington to solve big problems amid the need to raise the federal debt limit in a matter of weeks.The treasury department is taking “extraordinary measures” to pay the bills, but funding is expected to run out this summer. Economists warn that even the serious threat of a federal debt default would send shockwaves through the economy.A nonpartisan congressional budget office analysis estimated the Republican plan would reduce federal deficits by $4.8tn over the decade if the proposed changes were enacted into law.In the Senate, leaders were watching and waiting.Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer said House passage of the legislation would be a “wasted effort” and that McCarthy should come to the table with Democrats to pass a straightforward debt-limit bill without GOP priorities and avoid default.Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who stepped aside to give McCarthy the lead, said the speaker has been able to unite the House Republicans.Now, he said, Biden and McCarthy must come to agreement. Otherwise, he said, “We’ll be at a standoff. And we shouldn’t do that to the country.” More

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      How Joe Biden Can Win in 2024

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      In 2024, the fate of the Democratic Party will rest in the hands of an 81-year-old incumbent president whom a majority of the country disapproves of and even many Democratic voters think should step aside rather than run for re-election.In the past, the conventional wisdom would be that President Biden faces an uphill battle to win a second term. But in today’s volatile, polarized political environment — in which Mr. Biden’s predecessor and potential general election opponent, Donald Trump, became the first ex-president to be criminally indicted and Democrats posted a history-defying midterm performance — he opens his re-election campaign in a stronger position than many would expect.He can make a compelling case for his first-term accomplishments, his steady leadership and a vision of the country fundamentally different from what is on offer from Republicans — of freedom of opportunity and opportunity of freedom for all Americans.A number of factors have worked in his favor. Because of his age, Mr. Biden has been dogged by speculation about his re-election plans. But no major candidate has stepped up to challenge him in the Democratic primary, which will allow him and his campaign team to focus their time, efforts and resources on the general election.For months, Democrats have been frustrated with the gap between Mr. Biden’s accomplishments and the public’s awareness of them. Despite a flurry of big-ticket legislation that the president signed into law in 2021 and 2022, a February poll showed that 62 percent of Americans — including 66 percent of independents — believed that the Biden administration has accomplished either “not very much” or “little or nothing.” The administration has already begun chipping away at this perception deficit, with the president, vice president and cabinet officials fanning out to battleground states and other parts of the country to spotlight these accomplishments.The timing is right, because these programs are starting to have a big impact on the lives of many Americans. In March, Eli Lilly became the first major drug company to announce that it would cap out-of-pocket insulin costs at $35 a month, matching the Inflation Reduction Act’s cap on insulin costs for seniors. The administration says it has financed over 4,600 bridge repair and replacement projects across the country. And the private sector has committed over $200 billion in manufacturing investments since the passage of the Chips and Science Act, including $40 billion to build new semiconductor factories in Arizona and $300 million to manufacture semiconductor parts in Bay County, Mich.Mr. Biden has even made gains in mitigating voters’ concerns about his age. First, there was his lively, 73-minute State of the Union address, where he sparred ably with heckling Republicans, baiting them into backing his positions on Social Security and Medicare. And his surprise trip to Ukraine, which was the first time in modern history that a president visited an active war zone outside of the control of the U.S. military, received expansive coverage.But Mr. Biden’s biggest advantage might not come from anything he has done. Instead, it might come from the chaos among Republicans. This is welcome news for the president, who is fond of telling voters, “Don’t compare me to the almighty; compare me to the alternative.”There has been talk among many Republican leaders and donors about moving on from Mr. Trump — most recently, in the weeks after the 2022 midterms — but the base isn’t following their lead. Since his indictment by a Manhattan grand jury, his grip on the party, at least based on recent polling evidence, has grown tighter. That may be good news for his campaign, but he has significant vulnerabilities in a general election.And Mr. Trump is just the beginning of the G.O.P.’s problems. In recent years, the electorate has become more supportive of abortion rights. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, election after election has provided evidence of that. Yet Republicans have not come up with an answer — and in some ways, they seem to be making the problem worse. This month, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida signed into law a six-week abortion ban, which would prohibit the procedure before many women even know they are pregnant. Candidates and likely contenders including former Vice President Mike Pence, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina and former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas have endorsed extreme anti-abortion measures that would be effected nationally — upending years of Republican claims that abortion should be “left to the states.”There are no signs that abortion is letting up as a top issue for voters. This month, liberals won control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court for the first time in over a decade after Judge Janet Protasiewicz ran a campaign focused on abortion rights and extremism on the right and secured an 11-point victory.A key part of Mr. Biden’s appeal for Democrats is that he doesn’t provoke the sort of divisiveness that Mr. Trump does. Despite Mr. Biden’s sagging approval ratings, in the 2022 midterms, we saw that voting against the president was not a big motivator for many Americans (compared with 2018, when casting a vote against Mr. Trump was a substantial motivator).If these trends continue, Democratic voters will continue to be motivated to vote against an extremist Republican Party — and Democrats will stand a good chance of winning the critical independent bloc.President Biden and his team still have work to do to firm up his support before the election. First up is navigating a debt-ceiling showdown with Speaker Kevin McCarthy in the House, where Republican gamesmanship threatens the nation’s credit rating and could spike Americans’ mortgage, student loan and car payment rates. The issue is tailor-made to play to Mr. Biden’s core strength — that he is a competent, steady hand in an otherwise chaotic political system.The Biden team will also need to increase their messaging to voters about what he has been able to achieve in his first term and what’s at stake over the next four years. That effort will focus in particular on swing-state voters in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia, and will highlight progress in critical areas like infrastructure, manufacturing and job creation.Mr. Biden’s announcement video provides a preview of what we’ll be hearing from him over the next 18 months, and the subsequent four years if he’s re-elected: He is a defender of democracy and a protector of Americans’ personal freedoms and rights, including the rights of Americans to make their own decisions about reproductive health, to vote and to marry the person they love. The video juxtaposes chaotic images of Jan. 6, abortion protests outside the Supreme Court and Republican firebrands like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene with wholesome videos of Mr. Biden hugging and holding hands with Americans from every walk of life.The message is as subtle as sledgehammer: Do you really want to hand the country over to the Republicans and relive the chaos of the Trump years?Ultimately, if Joe Biden emerges victorious in November 2024, it will be because voters preferred him to the alternative — not to the almighty.Lis Smith (@Lis_Smith), a Democratic communications strategist, was a senior adviser to Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign and is the author of the memoir “Any Given Tuesday: A Political Love Story.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Trump committed treason and will try again. He must be barred from running | Robert Reich

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      The most obvious question in American politics today should be: why is the guy who committed treason just over two years ago allowed to run for president?Answer: he shouldn’t be.Remember? Donald Trump lost re-election but refused to concede and instead claimed without basis that the election was stolen from him, then pushed state officials to change their tallies, hatched a plot to name fake electors, tried to persuade the vice-president to refuse to certify electoral college votes, sought access to voting-machine data and software, got his allies in Congress to agree to question the electoral votes and thereby shift the decision to the House of Representatives, and summoned his supporters to Washington on the day electoral votes were to be counted and urged them to march on the US Capitol, where they rioted.This, my friends, is treason.But Trump is running for re-election, despite the explicit language of section three of the 14th amendment to the constitution, which prohibits anyone who has held public office and who has engaged in insurrection against the United States from ever again serving in public office.The reason for the disqualification clause is that someone who has engaged in an insurrection against the United States cannot be trusted to use constitutional methods to regain office. (Notably, all three branches of the federal government have described the January 6 attack on the US Capitol as an “insurrection”.)Can any of us who saw (or have learned through the painstaking work of the January 6 committee) what Trump tried to do to overturn the results of the 2020 election have any doubt he will once again try to do whatever necessary to regain power, even if illegal and unconstitutional?Sure, the newly enacted Electoral Count Reform Act (amending the Electoral Count Act of 1887) filled some of the legal holes, creating a new threshold for members to object to a slate of electors (one-fifth of the members of both the House and the Senate), clarifying that the role of the vice-president is “solely ministerial” and requiring that Congress defer to slates of electors as determined by the states.But what if Trump gets secretaries of state and governors who are loyal to him to alter the election machinery to ensure he wins? What if he gets them to prevent people likely to vote for Joe Biden from voting at all?What if he gets them to appoint electors who will vote for him regardless of the outcome of the popular vote?What if, despite all of this, Biden still wins the election but Trump gets more than 20% of Republican senators and House members to object to slates of electors pledged to Biden, and pushes the election into the House where Trump has a majority of votes?Does anyone doubt the possibility – no, the probability – of any or all of this happening?Trump tried these tactics once. The likelihood of him trying again is greater now because his loyalists are now in much stronger positions throughout state and federal government.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionYes, they were held back in the 2020 midterms. But in state after state, and in Congress, Republicans who stood up to Trump have now been purged from the party. And lawmakers in what remains of the Republican party have made it clear that they will bend or disregard any rule that gets in their way.In many cases, the groundwork has been laid. As recently reported in the New York Times, for example, the Trump allies who traveled to Coffee county, Georgia, on 7 January 2021 gained access to sensitive election data. They copied election software used across Georgia and uploaded it on the internet – an open invitation to election manipulation by Trump allies in 2024.If anything, Trump is less constrained than he was in 2020.“In 2016, I declared I am your voice,” Trump said last month at the Conservative Political Action Conference, a line he repeated at his first 2024 campaign rally, in Waco, Texas, a few weeks later. “Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”Filing deadlines for 2024 presidential candidates will come in the next six months, in most states.Secretaries of state – who in most cases are in charge of deciding who gets on the ballot – must refuse to place Donald Trump’s name on the 2024 ballot, based on the clear meaning of section three of the 14th amendment to the US constitution. More

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      AOC: ‘Better for country’ if Dominion had secured Fox News apology

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      Dominion Voting Systems would have better served the US public had it refused to settle its $1.6bn defamation suit against Fox News until the network agreed to apologise on air for spreading Donald Trump’s lie about voter fraud in the 2020 election, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said.“What would have been best for the country, would have been to demand that and to not settle until we got that,” the New York congresswoman said.Dominion and Fox this week reached a $787.5m settlement, shortly before trial was scheduled to begin in a Delaware court.Legal filings laid out how in the aftermath of Joe Biden’s election win and the run-up to the January 6 attack on Congress, Fox News hosts repeated claims they knew to be untrue, as executives feared viewers would desert the network for rightwing competitors One America News and Newsmax.Rupert Murdoch, the 92-year-old media mogul and Fox News owner, was among witnesses due to testify.Fox faces other legal challenges but its avoidance of an apology to Dominion caused widespread comment, with some late-night hosts moved to construct their own on-air mea culpas.Ocasio-Cortez, popularly known as AOC, acknowledged Dominion was not beholden to public opinion.“This was a corporation suing another corporation for material damages,” she told the former White House press secretary Jen Psaki, now an MSNBC host, on Sunday. “Their job is to go in and get the most money that they can. And I think that they did that. They are not lawyers for the American public.”The congresswoman continued: “I think what is best for the country, what would have been best for the country, would have been to demand that and to not settle until we got that. But that is not their role.“And so for us, I think this really raises much larger questions. Very often, I believe that we leave to the courts to solve issues that politics is really supposed to solve, that our legislating is supposed to solve.“We have very real issues with what is permissible on air. And we saw that with January 6. And we saw that in the lead-up to January 6, and how we navigate questions not just of freedom of speech but also accountability for incitement of violence.”Nine deaths have been linked to the January 6 Capitol attack, including law enforcement suicides. More than a thousand arrests have been made and hundreds of convictions secured. Trump was impeached a second time for inciting the attack. Acquitted by Senate Republicans, he is the leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination.Asked if media platforms should be held accountable for incitement, Ocasio-Cortez said: “When it comes to broadcast television, like Fox News, these are subject to federal law, federal regulation, in terms of what’s allowed on air and what isn’t.“And when you look at what [the primetime host] Tucker Carlson and some of these other folks on Fox do, it is very, very clearly incitement of violence. And that is the line that I think we have to be willing to contend with.” More